EclipsingSquid

If there's a slot in VinnCo, I'll take an invite. PSN: Answerofduty

Except it is functionally average. Nothing about the game is as terrible as most would have you believe. It's a perfectly competent, and frankly pretty fun, action platformer that is not stellar in any way (though occasional visions of how great it could have been do show through) but also not awful. At its core, it's fast-paced and handles perfectly fine. It mainly suffers from generic environment design, drab colors, sometimes questionable level design, and several bosses that could be more fun to fight.

This is all based on the PS4 version. IMO it deserves a solid 7.0. I'd grant it another 0.5 if they fix the few spots that have inexcusable framerate issues (though 90% of the game runs fine).

Mega Man ZX Advent has god-awful atrocious voice acting.

Bottom or the top

FF04-0000-0033-D0EF

It's a NSMBU level. I started making a level with a basic idea in mind as soon as I opened the game for the first time, and before I knew it, 3 and a half hours had passed and it was 2am. Also, it only contains day 1 and 2 stuff, as that's all I had unlocked. I spent some more hours yesterday finishing it, so here it is.

Nothing too fancy, but it's fairly difficult. The idea I had was for a level with two routes: a top route that's quick and relatively free of stuff that kills you, but made up of precise long jumps, and a bottom route that's much longer, and filled with enemies and dangerous things. Missing a top route jump sets you back down to the treacherous bottom route.

I kind of couldn't shake my initial compulsion to fill as much real estate as possible with STUFF, so it came out sort of jam-packed. Also, a couple friends who played through it just showed me some ways to circumvent some of the design that I painstakingly tried to make uncircumventable. Doesn't help that I COMPLETELY forgot you could bounce off spikes and piranhas safely with the spin jump in NSMBU. Nevertheless, I like how it turned out and enjoy playing it, and am curious to see if anyone else does. Star it if you like it. I might revise it in a week or so, once I have all the tools.

@giliap: I think the complexity of the controls is one of the game's strong points. It creates a lot of room for player improvement, and gives you a ton of tactical options once you master them.

How come articles never list Mega Man Zero when Inti Creates is mentioned? The MMZ games were probably the best things they've ever done... Definitely more notable to list than MM9 (which was fantastic, but come on.)

A few days ago, I popped in a friend's copy of the original MH on PS2 that's been lying around my room for ages, played it for about 5 hours (got to the Kut-Ku)... And my gosh, that game is hard to play. Mostly due to being unable to manage a claw grip effectively. However, I've always been decent at persevering through obtuse, user-unfriendly game design if the meat of the game is enjoyable enough, and I think I would have kept at it if MH4U hadn't just come out.

Anyway, MH is really not a series that there's any reason to play from the beginning, for story reasons or whatever (there isn't really one). I would say that the only two there's a reason play are MH Freedom Unite, and 4 Ultimate.

MHFU because, although I haven't actually played it myself, I understand it to be the biggest and most updated of the old school, "hardcore" MH games. Seems like it would be worth playing to experience a bygone era of the series at its best point. MH4U for obvious reasons: it's the newest, it's the most expansive, and the most polished. It's the most ambitious (I suppose that's not saying much for a MH game), and pulls every new idea off flawlessly. It's a flat better game than 3 Ultimate, and removes virtually any reason to play it, unless you really want to see what the water combat was like (you shouldn't).

So, if you really want to start with an earlier point in the series, MHFU is probably the only one that makes sense. Really, though, MH4U is the best game in the series, and you won't be losing anything by jumping in with the most recent.

I wouldn't mind being added to this, as I lack RL friends who play MH.

This is a tough one. There was SNES game I owned as a kid, that, strangely, I don't recall ever knowing the name of, for as long as I owned it; I would have to see gameplay to be able to identify it (cover or cartridge art might work, not sure). That fact made me consider that maybe it was a Japanese cartridge that my mom had found somewhere and picked up for me, but I think that's impossible as I believe the Super Famicom had different cartridges to the SNES, and I'm positive this was a standard SNES cart.

Anyways, I've been trying to identify this game for years, and every so often it pops into my head and drives me crazy for a bit. I got my SNES around '94 or '95, lost it in 2000, and I believe I owned the game in question for multiple years before I lost my SNES. I've never seen or heard tell of this game whatsoever outside of the one cartridge I used to own years ago, but I promise you that it was real. The gameplay is what I remember the best from it. It was pretty unique and hard to describe, but I'll try my best:

The gameplay took place in a bordered rectangular area (possibly a perfect square), which was a 16-bit pixel art picture. What the picture was depended on the level you were on. If I'm correct, one was just a green, grassy landscape with flowers and a tree or two under a blue, sunny sky, one was similar but with what appeared to be wooden, broken boat on land, (one of these two may have featured water, but I forget which), and there was one that was just a mechanical background with cogs and gears and shafts turning. I believe once you got past a certain level the backgrounds began to repeat, so there weren't too many different ones (although I never beat the game). The player character appeared to be a boy with bulbous blue hair (maybe a hat? Hard to tell, as it was a top-down perspective, and the sprite was pretty small), holding what looked like a white piece of chalk, or a wand, or something. A second player could also play, and player 2, when applicable, looked pretty much the same but with pink hair.

You could only move in 4 directions (up, down, left, right), there was only one movement speed (though I think there was a power-up that sped you up), and though you could change directions at will, I don't think you could stop moving. By default you were moving along the edge of the square border, but at any time you could move out onto the picture itself. The backgrounds started out looking all brown and decayed. The ground would just be dirt, the trees leafless and dead, the sky brown and depressing, that sort of thing. When you moved your character out onto the picture, you would trail a white line behind you, that appeared to be being drawn by the chalk/wand/whatever you were holding. The goal was to draw rectangles with the outer border using your white lines, and each time you did so, the inside of the rectangle would change to show a piece of the idyllic, green setting I described up above. Once you returned around 60 - 70% of the picture back to this state, the entire picture would do so and you would complete the level.

There were various enemy types that could harm you, and IIRC different ones had different movement rules and patterns. I recall there being one type that could move diagonally between the corners, and other types that could follow you along your white lines, stuff like that. I also remember the hit detection being incredibly wonky. Most of the time, an enemy would pass through you, but you would only take the damage a couple seconds later. Sometimes you would get hit immediately, as expected, but just as often you didn't take damage at all. I believe you could only get hit 2 or 3 times, and had a set number of lives, like an arcade game. There were also power-ups you could find by uncovering the sections of the background where they were hidden, though I think they were placed randomly.

Didn't mean to be so long-winded, but I have trouble coming up with a way to properly describe what I recall of the game. Does this sound familiar to anyone?